I am Canadian who started drawing and painting in 2009. Self taught until spring 2012, I went to Florence, Italy to attend spring and summer workshops at the Angel Academy of Art. There I pursued my interest in classical portrait and figurative painting.

As I continue to develop my technical skills as an artist, I also am discovering my voice. I love the beauty found in the human face and form. Despite pursuits to paint landscape, conceptual, and to explore loose brush techniques – none which I will display – I return back to the live model to develop my craft, painting classical realism, and to draw from empathic skills to capture their essence and emotion. I want to be a painter who can see the heart in a person and who can illustrate the life that is expressed in their face and form. Why is that important? Because poets and philosophers have long known that the human face and form calls us to the Divine. Plato, in the 4th century BC argued that, “By beholding beauty within the eye of the mind, you will be able to nourish true virtue and become a friend of god.”

When we pause to regard a face, whether ordinary or exceptional, we can be jolted out of our own immediate desires to see the sacred in their eyes and being. When viewing a painting of the human face and form, we have opportunity to see the divinity in others; when we see that higher order, we can make choices to be better, treat others with greater dignity and kindness, and we can choose virtue over malice.

Journal

MY WORK HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR SoJie 22! / / The Thinker / by Heidi Erisman / / / / Renaissance Gold / by Heidi Erisman / / / Join me at the Juried Invitational Exhibition… / / I am very excited to have my art selected, from over 73000 works of art, to exhibit in SoJie 22. SoJie 22 takes its name from the first letters of Solo…